Speech recognition is a promising technique as a user interface of a compact apparatus such as a portable terminal or the like. However, it is hard for a portable terminal to implement elaborate speech recognition that requires a large processing volume due to limited resources (the processing performance of a CPU, memory size, and the like) and cost.
As a means for solving such problem, a client-server speech recognition system may be built. In this system, the portable terminal (client) executes light processes, and the server executes heavy processes.
However, upon building such a client-server speech recognition system, balance among the load on the client, the data transfer amount between the client and server, recognition time, and recognition ratio must be taken into consideration.